Michael Foreman: 50 years of picture books

Michael Foreman: 50 years of picture books

Michael Foreman’s first picture book, The General, was published in 1961. In the half-century since he has become one of the best-known British writer-illustrators, with more than 300 titles for both adults and children. Foreman’s own stories often focus on conflict and war. His acclaimed autobiography War Boy: A Country Childhood, which combines photographs and adverts with watercolours and pen-and-ink drawings, is now being exhibited at the National Army Museum. The General, written at the height of the cold war, has been republished to mark its 50th anniversary

Monday 22 February 2010 05.55 EST
First published on Monday 22 February 2010 05.55 EST

War Boy (National Army Museum exhibition)

This is a drawing of me, aged about four, during the second world war. It was drawn for the exhibition War Boy, currently at the
National Army Museum in London. The exhibition, now half-way through a six-month run, includes several of the books I have written and illustrated about conflictPhotograph: Michael Foreman/Templar Publishing

War Boy – Interior of our mum's village shop (National Army Museum exhibition)

During the war the shop was always full of customers. Before I could walk my world was a world of legs – soldiers’ legs, sailors’ legs, bus drivers’ legs and, worst of all, little old ladies’ legs. Growing up in the shop was fantastic – American GIs, Poles, Czechs, Australians, troops from all over the world came to our shop for cigarettes and cups of tea and inspired my desire to travel the worldPhotograph: Michael Foreman/Templar Publishing

Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish (1972)

A very early book about the environment. I didn’t read children’s books when I was a child. The only books in our house were ration books. When I started writing and illustrating I knew little of classic children’s literature. My stories came from real life, from my concerns about what was happening in the world Photograph: Michael Foreman/Templar Publishing

War and Peas (1974)

A picture book about rich and poor inspired by my travels through India and the Himalayas. Location and landscape are important elements – characters almost – in many of my books. Photograph: Michael Foreman/Templar Publishing

Mia's Story (2006)

When coming in to land at Santiago, Chile, I saw the area between the city and the Andes mountains was smoking with rubbish dumps. While exploring the dumps, I made friends with people living and working there and saw how they survived through recycling the rubbish Photograph: Michael Foreman/Templar Publishing

War Game (1993)

This book is dedicated to four of my uncles who died in the first world war. Starting the story with a village football match, and ending with the spontaneous games during the Christmas truce, provides a shape to the narrative without relating the story of the whole war Photograph: Michael Foreman/Templar Publishing

The Ogre, from Fairy Tales by Terry Jones (1981)

I had real fun doing this picture and it typifies the endless joy I get from illustrating. There is a wonderful alchemy in flooding paper with water and introducing paints, inks, pastel and, in this case, Nescafe! The coffee grounds gave gritty, random texture to the Ogre’s rocky cave Photograph: Michael Foreman/Templar Publishing

Classic Fairy Tales (2005)

One of a series of collections of legends and folk tales from various cultures including India, North America, the South Seas and Japan that I have illustrated. In each case I tried to set the stories in authentic landscapes based on my sketchbooksPhotograph: Michael Foreman/Templar Publishing

The Mozart Question by Michael Morpurgo (2007)

I have been fortunate to illustrate many books by Michael Morpurgo. The Mozart Question was the most gruelling. Researching the images was very distressing. Sifting through photographs of families on their way to extermination is harrowing – children always stare straight at the camera. They look straight at you and you know their fatePhotograph: Michael Foreman/Templar Publishing

A Child's Garden (2009)

This book takes me right back to my earliest years – being the wrong side of the barbed wire fence. As a little boy, the local beach and the wide sea were the other side of the wire which formed part of our defences against invasion. A Child’s Garden is a story of a war-torn world and a child’s hope and optimismPhotograph: Michael Foreman/Templar Publishing

The General (1961)

After the war my teenage years were lived under a nuclear cloud. The cold war threatened instant mass destruction, with John F Kennedy and Nikita Kruschev locked in a face-off during the Cuban missile crisis. It was 1961 – the year The General was first published. The book is a little prayer for peace about a general who made his country the most beautiful in the world, rather than the most powerful Photograph: Michael Foreman/Templar Publishing